Our presence with our children determines the success of our relationship with them. This “success” is determined in every moment of being with them. It is not until we actually participate in our relationship with our child that the relationship has a knowable form.

Scene: Your child walks in the door late for dinner: “where have you been?” The form or body of the relationship emerges with a feeling of aggression and defense. Perhaps you are frustrated by waiting for her, too often. Maybe you are worried for her safety. In this one statement the relationship with your daughter takes form, this coming together of the two worlds that you occupy separately, emerges as one, with a clash! This is the current manifestation of your relationship, entirely determined by your statement as she enters the room.

Relationship exists separately from us in a formless field of possibility: Like some being without a body, our relationship with our child waits to take form and is determined by how we participate.

Scene: Your child walks in the door late for dinner: “Hi Sweetie, I worried about you, are you ok? What happened?” This will evoke an entirely different response.

Scene: Your child walks in the door late for dinner: “Hey, there you are . . . saved you some dinner. When you are settled I will sit with you while you eat, I want to hear about your day.”

Each scene is an opportunity to bring into form the relationship you have with your child. Of course there are extenuating circumstances that always come into play. So, how we engage will determine the form the relationship has in any given moment. Our relationship with our child is a participatory phenomenon that is entirely dependant on our behavior, thinking and feelings as we communicate them through our presence. And if we are present for this moment, we have a choice in how we build this relationship.

 It is not until we engage with the child that we can actually and accurately determine the true nature of what lives between us, the form our relationship will take in this moment. This means that this interdependent, co-arising entity – relationship, is always in a potential state of transformation. We can literally determine its evolutionary life solely by how we choose to participate.

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Timothy Dukes, Ph.D. and Santjes Oomen, HHP hosted the teaching of bringing clarity into daily life, a continuation of their cycle of teachings – Spirit in Practice™.  As one world is crumbling another is emerging. A group of 15 very talented leaders on Nantucket Island  joined us to explore how we can move away from a world of speculation, step out of confusion, and recognize distractions to become clear and present during these extraordinary times.

Recognition

• Lori Corry and Sandy Walsh assisted and participated as part of an emerging community of leaders who are in service of developing their own work, supporting Spirit in Practice, and gifting consciousness to the Earth.
• We recognized other teachers in the group and invited them to speak about their work: i.e. Katherine Baugh and Craig Kay.

Framework for the Ceremony

Our culture is changing, moving from a “taking and consuming” culture where we have placed our individual self at the center, to a culture of “giving,” where we recognize the Self as the center. We are moving away from seeking the self in the outer world to recognizing the Self in the inner world and sourcing from its guidance. In order to live in accord with the Self we need Clarity and Healing so that we can Progress in manifesting a world that recognizes the Self at the center of all things.

Our work today is not for self understanding, improvement or help. Rather today, we work to deepen our capacity to gift our consciousness in service of the Self that is seeking to emerge.

Teaching: Themes and Guidelines

Inspired by Nepo, Mark (2005) and Santjes Oomen

• How do we listen?
  • Give up expectation.
  • Empty and open. (Rilke quote_ Have Patience)
  • Give our attention completely, freshly and openly.
  • Lean in softly with a willingness to be changed by what we hear, by subtle feelings of recognition and by being recognized.
• Open to:
  • The sacred pulse of all things.
  • The Universe is alive and seeking union with our consciousness.
  • Allow brief illumination and allow all to move through our consciousness in these privileged and enlightened moments.
  • Greet the outer world with our inner being and open to the mystery.
• Allow
  • The nature of the universal dance as it cycles us from being self-centered to being other-centered.
  • Recognize that we are an integral part of an integrated whole in an ongoing process of reciprocal engagement with all that is.
  • Everything inside of us and between us is a circulatory – it is an ongoing exchange of what matters.

Bridge  

• When we can connect to what lives at the heart of our problems and at the heart of the problems of others, and listen to those connections, we become bridges to each other, the world and to the spirit that informs everything.
• When we speak integrity, we are speaking of how we care for the tender bridge between the innermost being and the common life of all beings.
• Yet, being a human bridge- a living tool that puts things together- is not easy. Everything from erosion to fears tries to wear us down.
• This is nothing new. Birds have always flown in the face of gravity, and fish have always made their way to the bottom despite the buoyancy of the sea.
• It is simply part of our calling: to be a bridge, to lie down and to stand up, so that living entities can join and realize that they are one

Gifting

• Give the world the best you have.
• This work is active service to that which is seeking to emerge and to inform us that we are all one and deeply and intimately connected.

Entering Ceremony

• A call to all participants to recognize that which brings them here today and what intention they carry within.
• We invited them as a group to approach the toys and to allow themselves to be selected by a toy which symbolizes what it is that wants to be known.
• Toys are placed in the center of the circle on an alter, candle burning, as one by one everyone in the room shares.
• Ending moment: hold and recognize what has joined us in the room.
• Embody all that is being revealed.

Deepening Ceremony

• We move back together as a group and allow ourselves to deepen the process of opening to all that is seeking our consciousness.
• Highlighting the themes of:
  • Bridge
  • Connection between Cosmos and Earth.
  • Removing obstacles
  • Transitioning
  • Change
  • And actively healing and gifting our consciousness to that which we are in service of.
• Embody all that is being revealed.

Closing Ceremony

• Sounding and Affirmations.
• To include gifting the merits of our work today to all sentient beings.
• Sending blessings.
• Requesting healing for self and others.

Reference

Nepo, Mark (2005). Exquisite risk: Daring to live an authentic life. New York: Random House

Rilke, Rainer Maria. (2008). Letters to a young poet. www.BNPublishing.net.

Lynch, David. (2006). Catching the big fish: Meditation, consciousness, and creativity. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin. 

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“Have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and … try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer. Perhaps indeed you carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming, as a particularly pure and blessed kind of life; train yourself for it – but take what comes in complete trust.” p. 21.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. (2008). Letters to a young poet. www.BNPublishing.net.

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Where do you go inside of yourself in order to draw up your creativity? In yesterday’s blog post I presented David Lynch’s prose about ideas being like fish, the deeper you dive the greater the catch. He suggests that it is expanded consciousness that allows us to dive deep and discover our inspiration.

Rilke addresses the need to create. For the artist, he suggests we must be a world onto ourselves and find everything within and in relationship with nature. “Go into yourself and … explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it as it sounds, without enquiring too closely into every word. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take your fate upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness without ever asking for that reward which might come from without. For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself.” (Rilke, 2008, p. 13)

To cultivate our creativity we need to turn away from seeking ourselves in the outer world, our relationships, and our careers and realize who we are and what we are here to accomplish by bringing our awareness into our experience of ourselves directly.

However, the question remains, how do we do this? How do we find the deep impulses to guide our creativity? I think we open ourselves to the possibility that all we have to do is ask. David White suggests that this; “can be done with a minimum of fuss, simply by sitting back in our chair and closing our eyes for a moment…and… ask for an image… it can, with a little practice, appear spontaneously.” (Whyte, 1994, p. 232,233) Try it now, simply close your eyes and ask silently inside, “may I have an image that will guide me to deepen my relationship with my creative self.” Wait for a few moments to allow an image to arise.

Notice, there is a particular feel that goes with an image or an understanding of our creativity. Whyte continues, “A discipline of calling up an image is an old form of contemplation. But a further step is to rest into the way the body feels in the presence of the image, then the image can be released and the state itself reached directly.” (p. 234)

Rest now within a state of wholeness as you again close your eyes and spend time with the image and notice the feel that emerges.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. (2008). Letters to a young poet. B N Publishing.

Whyte, David.  (1994).  The heart  aroused: Poetry and the preservation of the soul in corporate America.  New York:  Doubleday.

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“Ideas are like fish.

If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract.

And they are beautiful.

I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that can translate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything.

Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness – your awareness – is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch.” (Lynch, David. 2006, p. 1, 2)

Lynch, David. (2006). Catching the big fish: Meditation, consciousness, and creativity. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin. 

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In my doctoral thesis on Fathering, I open by quoting N. R. Gibbs from a Time Magazine article in 1993: “More children will go to sleep tonight in a fatherless home than ever in the nation’s history.” Gibbs said this more than 17 years ago, a haunting statement that is even truer today.

The absent father shows up all too frequently in my one-on-one sessions with clients, often as the source of debilitating behavior, depression, self sabotage, unhealthy relationships, and other destructive patterns. In organizations we find the effects of his absence in bullying behavior of bosses, impoverished personal resources of those charged with leadership and power struggles from top to bottom. Furthermore, many of today’s social challenges – increasing crime rates, substance abuse, physical abuse, and racial and economic disparity – are also rooted in the absent father.

When the father is experienced as absent but represented as present, either by himself, the child or someone else, the child is placed in a double bind; trust yourself and lose the other or trust the other and lose yourself.

Men who father can make a choice to be present. As fathers, if we are willing to hold presence, our children will find a way to receive what they need from us.  Our presence and the consciousness we bring to our relationships with our children, becomes the context that defines our ability to father.

The Present Father ™ is an active and compassionate posture available to the father in all moments of parenting. Through Gifting Presence, the direct application of consciousness, the father can choose to bring about connection and relational development while nurturing a context for growth and change for himself and for his children.

Additionally, anyone who lives with a man who fathers, is integral to the father’s presence. There is an inter-relational mandate that tells us that we can no longer imagine that we live separately from one another. We are already fundamentally connected and denial of this lived reality fuels our confusion and discord.

In any given moment, the journey a man takes in order to be present and show up for his child is no small matter. It is not just based on accumulated experience; it is a risky and unpredictable odyssey which calls into being the very soul of a man.

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As fathers, if we are willing to hold presence ( The Present Father™ ), our children will find a way to receive what they need from us. Our presence and the consciousness we bring to our relationships with our children, becomes a context that defines our ability to father. So what does it mean to “hold presence?”

Another “tool” I would suggest I call; Joining. As fathers, when we hold presence for our children, we are both the container and the contained. We join our children in such a way that we are fully part of their play, their question, their experience of eating dinner; while at the same time we hold and contain their process. When we play with them we ensure their freedom and safety. When they ask us a question we respond in such a way as to keep the question alive while joining their wonderment and curiosity. When we have a family meal, we have set the context for them to receive nourishment and nurturance while we become part of what they consume.

“There is an ancient Chinese story of an old master potter who attempted to develop a new glaze for his porcelain vases. It became the central focus of his life. Every day he tended the flames of his kilns to a white heat, controlling the temperature to an exact degree. Every day he experimented with the chemistry of the glazes he applied, but still he could not achieve the beauty he desired and imagined was possible in the glaze. Finally, having tried everything, he decided his meaningful life was over and walked into the molten heat of a fully fired kiln. When his assistants opened up the kiln and took out the vases, they found the glaze on the vases the most exquisite they had ever encountered. The master himself had disappeared into his creations.” –David Whyte

Joining means we lose ourselves fully to the relational moment with our children. In order to do this, like the kiln, we must also hold that moment so that the beauty of who we are as fathers becomes part of the formation of our children in a safe and facilitated context. We hold our presence as we disappear into our relationship with our children to re-emerge as an integrated component of their creation.

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As fathers, if we are willing to hold presence The Present Father™ , our children will find a way to receive what they need from us. Our presence and the consciousness we bring to our relationships with our children, becomes a context that defines our ability to father. So what does it mean to “hold presence?”

One of several “tools” I would suggest I call, Gifting Consciousness. When I am with my son, I attempt to place him at the center of my awareness and communicate to the best of my ability the life and vitality that is within me. I am aware of my ability to place this awareness into my relationship with him, while I am sorting through the distractions which diminish my attention.

The other day, while my son and I were visiting a friend and colleague, something occurred having to do with a project we were working on which made me realize how much more was required before we could deliver a proposal we had been developing. On the way home, distracted, my son asked me what I was thinking about. Sorting through my pre-occupation, I briefly shared my concerns. Then, with some effort, returned to our discussion of how we were going to continue to spend our day together. His prompting me to clarifying for him my distraction, allowed us to reconnect and continue to breathe life … together. If I am distracted, I communicate distraction. If I am dull, I communicate my dullness. If I am present, I communicate my presence and the life of our relationship finds us.

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I’ve been sitting here for some time watching this day as it unfolds. Spring colors radiate their brilliance and the light of awareness seems to brighten into this thought: As we age, we perceive the world with a greater capacity than we do when we are younger. We see mortality, we experience suffering and we imagine the end. Without this awareness, we may tend to shut down with fear, frustration and regret. However, we do have another option – to open to infinite possibility. Our diminishing eyes are being replaced by an expanding ability to see inward and into life itself. Our physical abilities, though limited, are steadier and flowing, allowing us to embrace subtlety. With age, we can open to the complexity of what it means to be human; embracing a trade-off between allowing our impulses to seek immediate fulfillment and an awareness of the soft flow of our vast capacity to experience pure possibility. When younger, we are driven to fill this capacity. With age and awareness, it is possible to simply hold open this capacity and experience the beauty of life as it reveals itself to us.

Look at your partner today. Spend time with a friend. Sit and observe, as the world you know unfolds before you. Notice what is seeking your attention and simply allow it to fill you.

“It is good to listen. If you listen carefully, without always passing judgment, you will enter into the very heart of the creature to whom you pay attention. You will begin to grow the flowers of your soul. Then all of nature will whisper to you her secrets.” (p. 161)

Michael, E.J. (1995).  Queen of the sun:  A modern revelation.  San Francisco:  Harper Collins.

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The other day I stumbled upon a wise man and want to share a story from his teaching. This story speaks to me of the absolute magic of a moment when we step outside of our typical frame of reference and wake up to “seeing” life as is verses as imagined. In this case a child helps us to do this:

“One day a father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the firm purpose of showing his son how poor people can be.

They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family. On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, “How was the trip?”

 ”It was great, Dad.”

 ”Did you see how poor people can be?” the father asked.

 ”Oh Yeah” said the son.

 ”So what did you learn from the trip?” asked the father proudly.

 The son answered, I saw that we have one dog and they had four.

 We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end.

 We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night.

 Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.

 We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight.

 We have servants who serve us, but they serve others.

 We buy our food, but they grow theirs.

 We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them.”

 With this the boy’s father was speechless. Then his son added, “Thanks, Dad, for showing me how poor we are.”

( June 4, 2010, http://www.khamneithang.blogspot.com/ )

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